Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Another Week Back in College

I'm catching up on the whole week, after preparing for and celebrating Purim.... The week's notes in Lit and Arts were a lot about the successors of Charlemagne, and the disjuncture between the disintegration of their authority and their realm, and their self-representation in Christian books and architecture as Christ's designated earthly power. As I wrote before, in trying to picture Europe from 1000 years ago, I am surprised to see how much awareness and connection there was by these kings in Aachen to Italy and Byzantium. They regarded their authority as tied to those places and the legitimacy they could gain by succession to them, claims to rule in Italy or support by the pope. How did that work, and how did that kind of political thinking flow down to peasants? During this time, Charlemagne's empire was not only divided by his successors, but also quite quickly fragmented into tiny principalities.

On the art side, and of course I'm just reading written notes and remembering bits of images vaguely, one thing that stands out is the combination of stylization with intense emotion. Spiritual commitment by the king was being represented, and moments in the Bible were being selected for their cosmic drama, and also the frontespieces and lettering identified the sovereign with not just stability in the face of the opposite politically in reality, but strong and intense rule. It's such a foreign visual language, not only to our times or the heyday of realism, but even to the Renaissance or the period just before then. I think I found those images in the Gospel manuscripts anything from disorienting to disturbing, really just because I couldn't parse them (not that I'm so great at understanding visual "language" anyway).

Gov was focused on Germany, to describe the trajectory of the 1800s and to use that to interrogate some theories of political modernization. The main thread was the Junkers, the artistocracy, and how they were able to maintain both their own position and a feudal organization of society for so long. They stood in the way of initial economic changes that would have weakened their social position, and they were stronger than any of the states vying for influence in German-speaking lands. Their military strength enabled them to crush developments in 1848 that might have led to some kind of liberal unified state, and then they were able to impose German unification 20-plus years later on their own terms, setting up institutions that they could dominate. Junker control of iron and railroads made sure that economic development did not create a separate strong bourgeoisie.

Professor Hall posed the question of whether institutional or cultural factors were at the root of the German path. Obviously it wasn't economics that dictated, since unlike Britain and France which commercialized and industrialized differently from each other but still found their way to democratic institutions in the late 1800s, Germany had arguably the most advanced economy by that time or the strongest one, but no democracy. 

I look at the notes and wonder about the contingent factors of personages like Metternich and Bismarck. Usually the "great man" theory is one to dismiss, and I generally do. Bismarck was responsible for a balancing act that squashed socialism and bought off the working class by a generous welfare state. He managed a tariff and industrial policy that benefited the Junkers and bought their support for his version of the state or at least its policies. He continued to make it impossible for other power centers to emerge. He played groups off of each other, made Catholics and socialist and Jews into enemies of the people and often each other.

In Germany, political parties emerged unlike in Britain as mass movements, which helped organize society and not just interest groups, yet none or no coalition emerged that was more moderate, or radical for that matter. In the end, says this week's notes, Bismarck's approach to the workers in particular would eventually backfire and take down the regime at the end of World War I, and leave no basis for even a French-Third-Republic-style regime to take over with any strength, thus paving the way quickly toward fascism, so Professor Hall said.

It was interesting to look at the Zionism notes against this same backdrop. Most of the action this week was just to the east, in Poland and Ukraine and Russia. Professor Bartal noted how much of traditional Jewish society and authority patterns had changed by the late 1800s. Already earlier, the rise of Chasidic sects and misnagdish yeshivot and Haskalah circles had weakened the sense of a unified, centrally led kehillah. Now, Chibat Zion chavrot were yet another kind of social form, along with mass political parties more on the German model of ideology, education, and social organization all in one.

Backing up a bit, Jews not only had frequently been left out of the nationalist movements; many were the contractors who built the railroads on behalf of the authorities or the aristocracy. This led to Jews being disproportionately urbanized all of a sudden, compared to many of the peasants (I think); at the same time, Jews became a pauperized proletariat as well. Russian regime policy lurched back and forth toward the Jews -- encouraging them to move to the cities, then blocking them from certain types of work in the cities, etc.

All of this opened the door to socialism as well. In the last couple decades of the 1800s, Jewish socialist theorists in Russia like Ber Borochov were trying to figure out a role for Jews in the Marxian scheme or to propose their own version of either utopian socialism or a Marxian-utopian hybrid. For example, since there was no Jewish polity, there might be a necessity to jump the Marxian process, to go straight from a lower class to a post-bourgeois order somehow, or to prototype that in Eretz Yisrael and advancing the local Arabs along in that process. Also among many Jews was a sense that the only answer to "the Jewish question" would come from the socialist transformation the world over. Some Jews would therefore throw in with the Russian socialists, and others would become socialist Zionists. The social debate in Russian became the dominant matrix for Zionist ideology, much more so than the Ahad Ha-Am school.

I'm obviously noticing the obvious, which is that up to here Zionism and Jewish history generally is being presented as mainly an Ashkenazi story centered in Europe, and there isn't much at the moment of the Jews already in Palestine or in Arab lands, and their influence on how Zionism developed. There had been some of these in the earlier weeks and I'm curious how they will return. I guess I'll see how that's told in the coming weeks.

I was also just tickled to see that there were socialist versions or take-offs on traditional Jewish texts. Like a piece of Marxist theory printed in the format of a Talmudic page, which could be hidden in a book during traditional study. Or a socialist take on Pirkei Avot, interpreting the famous "three things the world stands on" as science, work (avodah understood that way and not as spirituality), and charity to the workers. I had completely forgotten about that!

Yasher Koach

Here is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, when we read Parashat Ki Tisa and the story of the Golden Calf.

When someone has an honor to the Torah, we say to them: Yasher koach. This is a Yiddish-y inflection for yishar kochacha. Koach is strength and there are two views of what yishar kochacha means. Yishar kochacha or yishar kochaych, addressing a male or a female. It might mean “May your strength be straight.” From Yashar, which means straight in an ethical sense and also a geographical sense. If you ask directions in Israel, the most likely response is Yashar Yashar, sometimes Yashar Yashar ad hasof which means go straight until you can’t go straight anymore.

Or this might be from an Aramaic root that also means strength – “May your strength continue to be strong.” There’s also a debate about the vowels, whether it’s yishar kochacha or y’yasher koachacha, meaning “May the Divine make your strength straight.”

The custom is to say to someone yishar kochacha, yishar kochaych, and the person replies Baruch tih’yeh, may you be blessed, or brucha tih’yi. A person who has been close to the Torah has a strength, which hopefully can bestow a blessing. That in the same family as kissing the Torah.

Yasher koach is the Ashkenazi form of the custom, and the Sefardi form is Chazak u'varuch, "be strong and blessed", or Chazak ve-ematz, "be strong and courageous," and I like to reply in the Sefardi form gam Baruch tih’yeh, "Also may you be blessed." If you haven’t watched the comedian Modi talk about the difference between Sefardim and Ashkenazim on yasher koach vs. chazak ve-ematz, here it is on YouTube.

That’s the custom, but where does yasher koach come from?

You’ll never believe. The earliest reference to this phrase is in the Talmud Bavli (Shabbat 87a), where Resh Lakish said when Moshe smashed the tablets, the luchot habrit, God said: yasher koach. Which in Talmudic context clearly means, “Attaboy.” Well played, good job.” 

Resh Lakish notices something in the words but obviously it’s going to be more than the words. When God tells Moshe to make two new luchot, God says: I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, al haluchot harishonim, which you broke apart, asher shibarta (Exodus 34:1). On the surface level that sounds a bit passive-aggressive, so Resh Lakish hears asher shibarta as yishar koach she-shibarta. "Good for you for breaking them."

That’s really strange, that the thing we choose to say when someone is closest to the Torah originated in the act of destroying the two tablets.

And in fact Rashi’s final comment on the entire Torah, on the Torah’s eulogy for Moshe in the final verses we read on Simchat Torah, Rashi says that up there as one of the most important wonders that Moshe did for the Israelites was when he broke the tablets. (Credit to Rabbi Uzi Weingarten for this source.)

There is another early reference, which I got via Rabbi Tzvi Sinensky. It’s in a midrash (Shmot Rabbah 1:32) from probably a bit after Resh Lakish’s time in the Talmud. When Moshe runs away to Midyan and he chases away the shepherds that were menacing Yitro’s daughters, the midrash says that the women said to him: Yishar kochacha for saving us. And Moshe said: Actually it’s the Egyptian taskmaster I killed who saved you. That’s why the text has the daughters telling their father, according to the Torah: An Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds – meaning that the series of events that led to Moshe saving us started with that Egyptian man, who was beating a Hebrew slave.

Both of these yasher koach’s are paradoxical. Paradoxical sources for strength that we make a callback to, when we acknowledge someone who has been to the Torah or led us in a ritual or taught us Torah. Breaking the tablets could be a good thing. Another terrible brokenness that happened in Egypt, a beating followed by a killing, leads to a yasher koach.

And both of these moments, in Midyan and with the tablets, are moments of spiritual challenge and physical strength.

So what all is going on here? With broken and strong?

I know a lot of us feel that our moment now is spiritually challenging and also in our muscles and in our breathing and our heartrate. So part of strengthening our strength and straightening it is in attention to our bodies. Our hearts are pushing us so hard, to walk straight toward our solidarities and toward our principles. There isn’t a separation between what we think and know, and our emotions which are very physical things. And sometimes the burst of a push we can make reaches a limit, which the Torah represents as Moshe holding the tablets and then dropping or breaking them, or saving a life but violently and driving off the shepherds and then sitting in thirst, expended.

There is a lovely midrash about the breaking of the luchot that says that when Moshe first lifted up the tablets, even though they were big solid stones, they were light because of the letters that God had written, which had a heavenly gravity to them. Look at our Torah scrolls, where the words are written from a line etched above them in the parchment, as if they are rising up and not descending. So all the words on the luchot make them light.

When Moshe saw the calf, this midrash says that God took all the writing off the tablets and suddenly they became heavy again like regular stone. So Moshe couldn’t hold them anymore, and he dropped them and they broke. But this midrash says the erasing was actually an act of compassion. Seeing how far the people were from the covenant written on the luchot, God decided to temporarily hide the evidence, to take away all the terms so the whole people couldn’t be held guilty. Which would have been too much for Moshe. So this was actually a chesed for Moshe, a way to give Moshe time to catch his breath. And Moshe got it – instead of trying to hold onto the tablets right at that moment, when they weren’t working, he let himself drop them.

And God said yishar koach sheshibarta, good for you for breaking them, and soon we will be ready and write again and figure this out.

That’s the moment we need a yasher koach, a broken moment when we’re promised that the strength we felt before but not this moment, will return and increase and let us walk straight again.

Yasher koach is a reminder that the Torah itself knows us when we feel broken, because of the time of the calf, when he world around the Torah was so broken and the Jewish people was so broken that Torah itself had to be temporarily broken. The tablets were restored, and came to strengthen us in actual battle and in spirit.

It's good to know that the Torah knows some of the topsy-turvy-ness that we associate this time of year with the Megillah.

Yasher koach is a reminder that every certainty we have, everything that makes us ache today, is actually a revision of some original, a second version of the covenant. Because there is no value that came into the world pure, that hasn’t had a crisis where it broke and needed to be renewed or updated or made more complete. Not freedom, not equality, not Am Yisrael, not Tzelem Elohim. And that will continue. It feels sometimes like the world is broken today in a way it hasn’t before, but that’s not true. Over and over the tablets are broken or we have to let them go, and yasher koach, we mourn and then we engrave again, and it’s the only way we straighten our strength and our path.

And all of this is in our minds and in our bodies. Broken and strong are spiritual and physical. So when you come up to the Torah, make a point to hold onto it. Or when the Torah comes near you, or when it is held up in the air – feel your arm as you reach for it. And then we can say to you, Yishar kochachem. When you are strong may your strength be made straight, and when you are flagging, may you be strengthened.

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

Here in one place are links to the pieces I've done related to Purim and our contemporary world that I think are particularly worth a look or listen this year. For reading, listening, or watching.

Introducing Adar Conversations: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy (read and video)

Getting to Mi Yode'a ("Who Knows") -- Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World (video and podcast; courtesy of Valley Beit Midrash)

Responding to Antisemitism After October 7, With Esther As a Guide (video) -- with Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls: Wisdom From the Book of Esther (read)

Tov! Podcast About Judaism and "The Good Place": Chapter 24 -- Mask, Costume, True Self (video and podcast -- with Rabbi Ilana Schachter and Cantor Daniella Risman

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls -- Wisdom From the Book of Esther

This was Dvar Torah for Shabbat Zachor last weekend, March 8, 2025.

Last year at this time, I coined a term for a brand-new approach to wellbeing. I called it EIST, for “Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.” The big idea is that the Purim story is the best mirror in entire Tanakh, the whole Bible, for Jews like us.

Like us, the Jews of the Megillah are described as living in a vast and diverse world, all across the 127 provinces of the Persian Empire ruled by King Achasheverosh. Like us, the Jews of the Megillah were living in a world of material abundance, at least for some; and like us, the Jews of the Megillah, at least some of them, had two names, a Hebrew name and a Persian name.

Like our world, the world of the Jews in the Megillah has a random quality, where fate is a throw of lots; and the Megillah world is a morally topsy-turvy world in all kinds of ways, represented also as a tipsy world with all these drinking parties around King Achashverosh.

And like our world, inherent in the Megillah world is what we would today call antisemitism. It came to the surface easily, as ideas which could be spoken in the halls of power and converted into violence all over society.

The Megillah holds up a mirror to our world and then shows us a way out of it. That’s what Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy would be: the mirror we need to see things in and around us clearly, and the wisdom and practices to help us walk through and hopefully emerge strong and well.

The part of it I want to talk about this Shabbat is about antisemitism. This is Shabbat Zachor, and we have read in the Torah and the Haftarah about this people Amalek who are thought to be the most incorrigible enemies of the Jewish people, because they are the most ruthless people imaginable. Haman in the Megillah is their descendant. These are difficult readings, but rather than bury them it’s better for us to face them.

My question for today on Shabbat Zachor is not whether there is antisemitism around us, because there is. And it’s not whether there is more of it than a couple years ago, because there is. Or even whether it’s worse on the anti-Israel left or the white nationalist right, because both are far more active and in the open than they were ten years ago.

My question is about who we are as we perceive and experience antisemitism, directly in our lives or as we read and see film of it in our world. Will we continue to be the Jews we know we ought to be? Will we perceive hate in so many directions that we can’t look at ourselves in the mirror anymore, because we are too busy looking over our shoulders?

Every single day I get an email from the Anti-Defamation League titled “Campus Crisis Alert.” It has a little red siren icon next to the sender in my inbox, so it stands out from my other emails. It doesn’t matter what happened that day on what particular campus – I get a “Campus Crisis Alert.” It doesn’t matter if the content of the email contains mostly good news, about actions taken by Jewish students or university administrations! It’s still called “Campus Crisis Alert.”

I think the ADL is an incredibly important organization and yet I find the daily crisis alert alarming, for a different reason than they do. I have my own campus insider, my daughter at Barnard, and this week was a particularly bad one there. Talk about not knowing the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman – the material handed out at sit-ins that obstructed classes and barricaded a dean in her office is actual Hamas material. There was a crisis there this week and I’m not sure it’s resolved.

Yet even there, not every week is a crisis of antisemitism, and I know this from my insider. The hostages are a crisis. Antisemitism is a problem. There are groups invested in maintaining the crisis feeling, within the Jewish community and within our American politics. But as Jodi Rudoren, the editor-in-chief of The Forward, wrote this week -- when you’re in a crisis you can’t think straight, and when you say you’re always in a crisis you excuse yourself from ever having to think.

So what do Esther and Mordechai teach us, who were absolutely in a crisis of antisemitism? What’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we need?

The most important single moment in the Megillah is in Chapter 4, when Esther is first learning about what everyone else already knows about, the decree of genocide that Haman has persuaded King Achashverosh to issue. Esther first pleads powerlessness – I cannot go to the king, if you are not called and you go that’s sure death, and he has not called me for thirty days.

Mordechai sends a message back to her:

“If you keep silent, yes silent in this time,
spaciousness and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will disappear.
And who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.”

כִּ֣י אִם־הַחֲרֵ֣שׁ תַּחֲרִ֘ישִׁי֮ בָּעֵ֣ת הַזֹּאת֒ רֶ֣וַח וְהַצָּלָ֞ה יַעֲמ֤וֹד לַיְּהוּדִים֙ מִמָּק֣וֹם אַחֵ֔ר וְאַ֥תְּ וּבֵית־אָבִ֖יךְ תֹּאבֵ֑דוּ וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃

Obviously Mordechai is giving Esther a charge to stand up for her people, for us the Jews. But it’s a very nuanced charge.

Mordechai says to Esther: You have to speak, because right now the Jews do not know what to say about what is going on. All we are doing is wailing and crying out, or speaking without clarity. Someone needs to give better words to this moment, and someone needs to starting guiding us and giving us something constructive to do.

It needs to be you, Esther, because it needs to be someone who is powerful and not powerless. And you are actually powerful, even though you think your power is tenuous. And who knows, maybe the purpose of your power is not simply what I Mordechai originally thought when I sent you in this direction. It’s not that you have status, that you’re my insider. Your power as a Jew is important for the rest of us to see, so we will not feel as vulnerable as we currently think we are.

Mordechai says: If you do not define what this moment requires and what it means, someone else will. One way or another this Haman decree is going to be thwarted. But if you do not stand up, someone who is not you Esther with your moral voice, probably someone not even Jewish – someone else is going to come and rescue us. And then they will say we owe it all to them, to some outsider, and we will be beholden to their truth forever.

And if that happens you and the legacy you are part of will disappear; the moral heights you had in reach will mean nothing.

Mordechai says to Esther: It’s a matter of revach v’hatzala. Hatzala means rescue, so physical safety. Revach is spelled like ruach – spirit. What’s at stake, Esther, is not only our safety but our souls, our neshamas. You can help us not only survive but keep our hearts intact.

And Esther responds in remarkable ways. Last year my colleague Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed taught me that Esther starts to realize that she has all these servant-girls who revere her as queen. To them she is absolutely the queen, a person of power and stature, and she can ask them to do things for her.

Esther tells Mordechai to direct the Jews to take three days and focus and fast. Fast for me, she says, tzumu alai. She asks them to concentrate on her, to take their minds off the enemies for a time and instead put their attention on her – what she is all about, what she will do and how she will guide them. She is reminding them that even this crisis isn’t a tomorrow crisis; the edict will take months to play out. We don’t need a solution tomorrow, though we do need one. But if we don’t figure it out right this second all is not lost.

After three days she takes what seems like a risk, but it all dissolves when the king sees her. The text says that Esther has the quality of chein, that she is a catalyst for the grace and graciousness in everyone who meets her. It was there the moment the king’s servants first met her, and it’s why the king chose her even though he’s too much of a buffoon to remember until she invites herself back.

I like to think that from there, everyone sees Esther in a high profile summit with the king and Haman -- and the Jews realize that she is okay, not just safe but in control. And they are able to exhale, and think.

When the king finally takes her side and our side, the Jews of the empire absolutely had to stand up in self-defense. But Esther worries that the Jews are learning the wrong lesson – that the only answer to Haman’s violent plan is violence; that the problem isn’t just Haman and his circle but an entire empire of people who may be ready to carry out his plan. So Esther sends a letter to the Jews of the entire empire and instructs them: We will remember Haman’s plan, and we will remember what I did and how we all stood up for each other.

And as we do it, as we retell a story with violence, we will send gifts to each other, mishloach manot, and we will take care of those in need among us, matanot la’evyonim. We will be what we want the world to be at the exact moment we are remembering when the world was not.

We will tell not only about Haman – we will tell about us, on our terms. We will tell that a Jew is someone who does not bow down to any human, that a Jew is someone who looks out for the life of the king and the welfare of the kingdom.

That’s the way out. That’s what the EIST therapist would say to us.

Esther and Mordechai lived in a world something like ours, and actually in a crisis time. The antisemitism we face in the U.S. is not a crisis like that which threatens our very existence. It’s instead a problem, a real one and a big one. And part of solving problems, and being able to strategize, is to protect who you are, the best of who you are.

That includes not letting your enemies define you, or give them control over your consciousness, your rhythm, your daily life.

So in addition to advocating for ourselves and pushing back on the falsehoods, some of what we need to do right now is to refocus ourselves on mitzvot and to see ourselves, each of us, as people of mitzvot – to love our own Jewish neshamas.

We have to be good to each other even more, Jew to Jew, at a time when not everyone is good to us.

We have to be excellent friends to other groups who are also going through things now, loyal allies. We are not the only ones with problems. Esther at the end of the story was not just a Jewish heroine, but queen of the whole empire. We have to remind ourselves of our own power and to use it for good.

We have to continue to keep faith about America and its ideals, its promise, its pluralism, even when that faith seems like a leap of faith. We have to believe in an American Jewish future that is a good one. We cannot give those things away, because then our fears will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of us have to be willing to be uncomfortable. To see ourselves as strong enough to go and talk to people or in places we worry we will be attacked. It’s what I have been doing. You might be surprised by what happens in some of those places.

There are many people doing all of these things in the Jewish community now, and so many of them are the college students, especially on the campuses where it’s hardest. They are so inspiring.

As Mordechai says to Esther, Mi yode’a – who knows if this is why we are the Jews here today at this particular time, during this generation of challenge for American Jews and for Jews everywhere.

When it comes to antisemitism especially since October 7, Revach v’hatzala yaa’amod la’Yehudim – we need security and our souls, both at the same time. Esther and Mordechai showed us how we could secure ourselves and even make our souls larger in the process. That’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we have all been looking for.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

More College

I am noting that in the Lit and Arts course, what seems to be easiest for me to understand (and was back then too?) is architecture. I'm not spatial, generally, and geometry was my weakest part of math. But the layout of churches seems to be intelligible to me. Charlemagne's church architecture has a logic to it, defining what a Christian ruler is and his relationship to his people, the clergy, and Christ. I noticed in the notes that Professor Nercessian compared Aachen to the Jerusalem Temple, as a representation of divinely created order within the chaos of life at that time. I find myself wondering what things like "order" and "standardization" were like related to before Charlemagne and in comparison to the hyper-organization of life today (not that we don't have our types of chaos).

In Government, Professor Hall noted about Britain in the 1800s two things -- the switch in the bourgeoisie's alliance from the commercial aristrocracy to some part of the working class; and how that alliance was mediated through or really because of the durable legacy of parliamentary stability, such that social conflict was in politics and not raw class conflict.

In France, the 1800s saw a succession of regimes, as monarchism and for a time a strong presidency kept coming back and then being undermined, and the question is why. Among the underlying factors Professor Hall pointed out were the fact that while Britain had a certain democratic ideology and corresponding institutional framework for more than a century, France's democratic ideology was only ten to twenty years old when industrialization began. The slow industrialization meant that the bourgeoisie was not large enough to be an independent force, and the peasantry remained large. Both groups, the peasantry more so, responded to monarchist offers -- strong top-down leaders coopted the language of democracy and the supposedly democratic plebiscite to woo the peasants. The working class leadership never coalesced because much of it was killed during rebellions, and the political system did not even in the late 1800s offer an avenue of influence for socialist parties. Consequently labor was not a parliamentary force and turned toward either more radical revolution or demands for working conditions outside politics. Thus the Third Republic, which endured for about 70 years finally, did so by performing relatively limited functions -- catalyzing a certain amount of industrialization but not anything like in Britain or even Germany, and nothing more major than that, and preserving for the most part the social class arrangement in France as it had been.

Two things that struck me in the notes -- One was the description of political parties in France as being based on locales and notables, such that they did not provide the durable mediating, aggregating, and compromise mechanisms that define British or American politics. (I think this is still a legacy somewhat in France today?). The other was Professor Hall's discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, and how little attention he paid to the function of antisemitism, which I still don't know enough about, other than to note that nationalism was a fissure point in French politics in a way that weakened the Third Republic.

In the Zionism course, Professor Bartal talked about how the all the religious reform movements within Eastern European, non-westernized Jewish society, all weakened the traditional authority structure of the community without disturbing the daily practice of religious tradition. He didn't really draw a line from this to Zionism, other than to suggest that at some margin this made the move into Chibbat Tziyon easier for traditional Jews. Some of the moves of the Eastern European Haskalah, such as the publication of newspapers and journals, were copied from the more Western maskilim and made it possible for traditional Jews to learn about new trends.

The liberalization movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland and Ukraine, multiethnic polities, often found Jews on the side of the state rather than the nationalists, because the state was the champion of reform based on multiethnic rule while the nationalists had no room for the Jews as a people regarded as not part of the "nation." In Russia up until the early 1880s, Jews had hopes that the czar and his reforms would be beneficial for Jews, but the violence following the assassination of the czar squeezed Jews from both directions. The people rejected or suspected the Jews, and the czarists also made up stories that the Jews were responsible. With the failure of emancipation already in Western Europe, there was no room for hope of acceptance in the Russian realm.

A large part of the Chibat Tziyon movement in this phase was small-scale and for self-help and education; there was no plan yet for migration to Eretz Yisrael. A schism arose between those focused on the practicalities of changing the Jewish situation, and Ahad Ha-am, who argued that a cultural and intellectual-spiritual transformation was the primary thing that needed to happen before the Jews could make any social change or migration succeed.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #12: Exodus and Freedom

In my overview of ethics and Exodus, you may have noticed I didn’t talk about one central idea: freedom! Well, the Jewish conception of freedom deserves its very own presentation.

In Judaism freedom has many layers. The term for free people is b’nai chorin; a free person might be a bat chorin or a ben chorin. One of the first blessings we say in the morning expresses gratitude to God she-asani bat chorin or she-asani ben chorin, for making me a free person.

Obviously from the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, freedom means not being subject to a tyranny or tyrant, and not being forced to work without earning a fair share of the fruits of one’s labor. Flipping that around, we have a positive obligation to do what’s in our power to increase political freedom and eliminate economic exploitation. Whether that’s in how we vote or how we treat people we pay to work for us, or in more continual or large-scale civic action.

When the rabbis of the early Talmud were discussing how to tell the Exodus story at the Pesach Seder, there was a disagreement about the exact arc -- the beginning and the climax of the story. The sage Shmuel said that the story begins with “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Mitzrayim”, Avadim hayinu l'Phar'oh b'Mitzrayim -- suggesting that the story is fundamentally about political and economic oppression, and the Exodus achievement is crossing the sea into freedom. Rav said that the story begins with our idol-worshipping ancestors long before even Egypt, and that the real transformation in the story is arriving at Mt. Sinai. There, away from Pharaoh, we were given the freedom to accept the Torah and the Divine covenant. Rav’s concept of freedom includes the ability to choose a covenant to be bound by.

The debate between Rav and Shmuel foreshadows a distinction made by the modern Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from unjust constraints. Positive freedom is freedom for. The choices a free person has the ability to make ought to be good choices, directed at a higher good and guided by Torah. The Exodus story is obviously about both. The demand Moshe brings to Pharaoh from the Divine is not just “Let My people go”, but “Let My people go that they may serve me" Shalach et ami v'ya'avduni.

The freedom at Mt. Sinai involves trading a surface freedom for the ability to choose wise guidelines and commitments to live by. Being able to make a covenant and bind ourselves to it is part of the Jewish concept of freedom.

Sometimes what gets in the way of our positive freedom isn’t force from the outside, but forces on our inside. In fact all the way back at the beginning of the Torah, in the Garden of Eden, the first woman exemplifies for us the nature and operation of freedom as she weights the fruit she has heard she may not eat, but which the snake says will bring her godlike powers. The Torah describes her moment of deliberation, as she sees that the fruit is good to eat, exciting to the eyes, and fascinating to contemplate. In that moment, she is free to assess the outside authority of God and the snake, her relationship to her husband – all of that coming from the outside -- and the superficial and deeper dimensions of the fruit, the present and the possible future that might flow to her if she eats – these are on the inside.

Being free means using our capacity to assess authority when authority gives us both rules and the space to follow or question. It means sorting out our perceptions and judgments, noticing what is on the surface which might appeal to our desires in the moment, and what might be deeper implications or consequences.

Being b’nai chorin, free people, means bringing more decisions into this kind of awareness. It means cultivating that in others whether as educators or parents or friends, and creating spaces for others to act with that kind of freedom. And not ourselves being arbitrary authorities or exerting emotional force or manipulative words to push someone away from their freedom.

That’s why to me there is a connection between the first of the Ten Commandments and the first rule in the law code that immediately follows. The First Commandment doesn’t sound like a commandment – “I am Adonai Your God who brought you out of the land of Mitzrayim, out of the house of slaves.” The first law is about possessing and freeing a household slave after six years. I don’t think it’s really a permission to own slaves. On the contrary, it’s a recognition that each of us at some point finds ourselves exerting coercive power over someone else, in one way or another. We have a responsibility not only to relinquish that, but to bring a person who is not free enough toward their own positive freedom.

Back to College Update

It has always been hard for me to find a way to interact with art that isn’t verbal. I want to think and talk about the concepts that are artistically represented, to interpret them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems incomplete. As I go over Lit and Arts, I’m thinking about this but also realizing the course is about contextualizing art in a period period in history, to see what we can learn about history, politics, and religion through art. I’m not sure yet if I would have learned the same things without the artistic pieces, as a straight history course.

The last few classes have been about Charlemagne, and some of the manuscripts, churches, and monasteries from his reign. Artistically, there is something about I think Germanic stylized nature forms, vines and animals that aren’t meant to evoke a scene or a landscape and aren’t traditionally classic or Roman or Christian. Professor Nercessian talked about some ways that Gospel manuscripts were organized, and how the lettering was meant to set a standard for the educated classes that Charlemagne was trying to develop as an elite ruling class.

There is the prominence of the X-R (“chi-rho”) page in manuscripts, about Christ as King. It’s not entirely clear to me if the blending of earthly rule and spiritual supremacy is pretty new or a continuation of Byzantine motifs. But I think the imagery of Christ as a ruler jumped to a new level in this time, and even when there wasn’t a parallel image of the emperor, just the vibe of Christ as imperial was a contribution to imperial power.

It is interesting, thinking about my preconceptions of the early Middle Ages, that Charlemagne was trying to consolidate his rule over much of Europe through culture. I hadn’t realized just how real was the touch of a common culture at this time, as far as the islands of Scotland and Ireland – maybe not as a dominant culture but at least a palpable presence. Charlemagne and the pope seemed to use each other, since the church was the only other entity with pockets of authority and ownership of vast lands. Charlemagne coopted that, and the pope coopted Charlemagne. I don’t know if the emperor felt that Christianity was a worthwhile culture for his realm, or just a useful one. There was a special Professor Nercessian talked about the gospel codices as standards for copymaking.

There was a transition from a roaming court, which was one way to exemplify rule over a large area, to a center in Aachen with a magnificent church and other palaces and buildings. If I read the notes right, Charlemagne emulated and advanced prior Roman/Byzantine emperors in incorporating adoration for the emperor into the traditional basilica or enhanced basilica (my term, not a scholarly one).

The Book of Kells is a thing I remember.

In Gov 1170, there was a brief comparison of industrialization in Germany and Italy with Britain, and why the path of the first two set the stage for fascism. In Britain, industrialization was funded largely by economic activity itself, so that a strong state was not originally necessary and both industrialists and commercial landowners developed power. In Germany and northern Italy, the late-starting industrialization required concentration of capital in investment banks, and railroad and infrastructure building by the state, so the state drove the empowerment of groups and not vice-versa, and there was not the same multiplicity of power centers.

Which is not to say that Britain developed without massive dislocation. Eventually the requirements of capitalism drove people from the rural land toward cities, into conditions of both squalor and lack of traditional social structures. When the poor did try to organize or rise up, it tended to be in a mode of restoring old social structures, rather than pressing for revolutionary new ones, and the aristocracy could coopt that part of the agenda.

Political conflict in Britain in the 1800s was primarily between the new bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. At key points, Parliament served as an effective mediating institution – there was bargaining over tariffs and poor relief, there were strategic concessions to the new monied class and also times when the more commercial aristocracy saw an alliance with industrialists as in their interests. Professor Hall suggested that the legacy of parliamentary compromise which ended the Glorious Revolution continued to have an impact, and the most effective sources of change were by those who could organize into interest groups for concrete changes. Some of those changes were constitutional – the expansion of the franchise, reorganizing city governments, reduction of rotten boroughs. These came about through somewhat traditional parliamentary processes. The lower classes were shut out from driving these processes, unless it was in the interest of another class and in concert with them.

Professor Bartal taught that the messianism was a matrix for an early Zionism in the mid-1800s, from a couple directions. The stall of integration of Jews was accompanied by a small but significant trend in Christian millenarian circles in Britain and the U.S., which saw the development and improvement of the Holy Land as a redemptive step. Jews’ separate existence, in this light, was viewed as a positive, a way of positioning Jews for a role either as returning Jews or as new Christian converts in the Holy Land.

Some prominent wealthy British and French Jews allied with this Christian movement, to fund settlements in Palestine as initially part of the reform and education of more backward Jews, most of which was taking place in the home countries. British and American Christian authorities and philanthropists in turn green-lit these enterprises by people like Montefiore and Cremieux.

The messianic trends within Kabbalistic Sephardi and Chasidic Judaism also became a frame for a small number of Jewish religious proto-Zionists to view settlement in the Land of Israel. Some mystics looked to the year 1840 as a date for the Messiah, as some Christians did for the second coming. To these Jews, the small steps of Jewish self-improvement in the context of incomplete integration were also signs of the beginning of a messianic era. (There was a fascinating piece I hadn’t remembered about some Jews seeing Cremieux, Montefiore, and Rothschild as encoded in some messianic verses of Torah and prayer.) The stall of integration could be seen as a positive – the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness was good, and the improvement of Jews, which was driven by negative stereotypes, was also in service of making us more fit for redemption or a redemptive era.

In the secular stirrings before the 1880s, language and culture were understood as more central than religion (of course) and even land sometimes. Professor Bartal mentioned some interesting perspectives on Hebrew. One was that unlike Eastern European nationalisms, which took languages of lower status and elevated them, Ben Yehudah-style Haskalah looked at Hebrew as an originally elevated language that had been displaced by lower vernaculars like Yiddish and needed to be restored. Interestingly, Ben Yehudah looked to Arabic to generate new modern words and my notes say that 25% of modern Hebrew comes from Arabic.

Zionsim, such as it was in the middle of the 1800s, was a small movement alongside three main well-defined Jewish responses to modernity – reform of Judaism, whether religious or in a Haskalah vein; Orthodox rejection of the Reform impulse; or a passive integrationism.

College: Historical Transitions

Professor Hall started his course with a terrific introduction, setting out the goal of the course: to figure out why in particular Great Britain, France, and Germany entered the modern age from similar medieval conditions but took such different political routes. Britain had a relatively nonviolent transition toward democracy. French made the transition with violence and setbacks. Germany was the one which had fascism. He said we would review the history and assess different factors and theories, using a comparative perspective to try to isolate factors which made the key difference in these trajectories. He named some of the major theorists and theories of modernization that I would come to really only begin to get the following year in Social Studies 10, such as Marx and Weber and Durkheim.

In the first phase of the transition from feudalism, there were two major sets of trends. One was economic. Each society had a distinctive "crop", which shaped how commercialization could occur. In Britain it was wool, which would require the consolidation of land for pasture. In France it was grapes, which was labor-intensive and gave the patterns of the peasantry a tremendous inertia. In Germany it was grain. The other trend was political, and shaped how the institution of the state and the monarchy would change in the age of absolutism. In Britain, the new economy of grazing and "putting out" generated a new class of gentry, distinct from traditional artistocracy. In France, the monarchy created a bureaucracy to enforce the collection of taxes, a new set of nobility distinct from the traditional landed nobles. In Germany, which was not yet a unitary state, what political authority existed relied on the traditional aristrocracy, the Junkers.

I hadn't known how consequential the commercialization of agriculture was as a phase before the market and industrial revolutions of the late 1700s and 1800s. Professor Hall did a nice job presenting us a ton of detail, organizing it, stopping to talk about big theories of these changes like Marxism and critiquing them and refining them, and also introducing what he called the question of structure vs. voluntarism, meaning the role that factors in the moment, decisions by political actors, and ideas played in addition to structural constraints.

I certainly hadn't really thought of or maybe even known that Britain had experienced a revolution in the 1600s, or two -- though it occurs to me now to question whether the same term is appropriate for Britain as for the U.S. and France. I will say now what I think about a lot too, which is that I know really nothing about the backdrop of non-European societies and whether any of this analysis of the transition to modernity applies. I don't think Professor Hall claimed that it does; I just know that like a lot of people, I carry the implicit notion that Western modernization is the norm, or that the British/American experience is in some sense an ideal to which others should be compared. It's a gap in my learning I still have not addressed.

One thing I note about the French Revolution is that it doesn't stand pat for a single explanation. Professor Hall labeled its different phases -- driven at different times by different groups in society, sometimes peasants, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes aristocrats, sometimes urban sans-culottes. He made note of the terror as both a new kind of state action, and an ideology identifying the state itself as a source of virtue and authority, distinct from society or the king who ruled. He also talked about how in France, the Revolution tore apart so many institutions, set the state against the church, did not succeed in reconciling the interests of peasants in earning enough from their crops and city-dwellers in having affordable food. So the French state would continue to convulse, and the Revolution and the Napoleonic period created a strong state with an army but not a modern land economy or a modern social class powerful enough to move the nation into a strong and stable next phase.

In Britain, Professor Hall noted that industrialization took off first even though Britain lagged France and Germany in innovation or education. What Britain had was an alignment between the state and new economic actors, who adopted the technology of the factory and accepted patterns of the city and both internal and international trade and who could propel them forward. There was social transformation and suffering, a complete overturning of the logic of land, labor, and capital within a hundred years or less -- and while there were upheavals they did not overwhelm the political system the way that France experienced.

Germany was still fragmented into separate governments in a looser economic alliance well into the 1800s, and while Britain made the leap from textiles to steel, Germany was still much more rooted in grain for far longer, so industrialization was impeded until later the new state would push it ahead in a convulsive way.

In the Zionism class, Professor Bartal to my surprise on reread referenced contemporary Palestinian nationalism in the first class. This was a year and a half before the first intifada. I think from him I learned the idea of the Jews as a medieval "corporation" -- a recognized legal-social entity with its own parameters from the rulers. I didn't remember two things from the early lectures. One is that before the Enlightenment period, during the age of European absolutism, the Jewish of particularly Central and Eastern Europe were experimenting with a kind of parallel process of consolidation, such as the "Council of the Four Lands." Already in other words the purely local, self-contained corporate community was experiencing some stresses in the 1600s. Also he said that again before the period of political change, there was a certain shift toward the Atlantic, to some degree even in Jewish migration, as opportunities in the commercial and mercantilist centers began to draw Jews away from the Ashkenazi centers.

Professor Bartal portrayed some of the Wissenschaft scholars as documenting historical processes within Jewish reality that might be leading to the end of separate Jewish existence as it had been known. I don't remember that then or hearing that since. I am struck my how small the window was in the 1800s between the offer of citizenship to the Jews in liberalizing countries and the turn toward modern anti-Semitic attitudes. I don't know how Bartal saw it, but there is both an incredible creativity in Jewish movements like Haskalah and self-critique/reinvention/reform of Judaism and also a tremendous pressure from the outside, from romantic-era attitudes toward Jews and about nationhood while the Jews were still assimilating earlier Enlightenment, liberal ideas. That mismatch would crash all over Europe in the late 1800s, from France to Russia.

In one lecture, Professor Bartal tried to answer why anti-Semitism became such an important feature of 19th century social thought and reform discourse, including among leaders and thinkers for whom traditional anti-Jewish attitudes were not important. I hadn't remembered that he pointed out how anti-Jewish attitudes morph to absorb whatever the core issues or critiques of the time area, and in that sense continuous in energy with medieval anti-Judaism even though the content in completely different. He said that some of the ways Jews were described are true, but don't carry the weight that anti-semitism assigns them. Even thinkers who viewed Jews positively overemphasized the features they admired (e.g. that Jews embodied the spirit of capitalism). All of these are commonplaces I think today; maybe they were back then and I just didn't get it. Ultimately, what made anti-semitism so potent, he argued, was a combination: the failure of political equality and liberal ideas to achieve enough equality of social status for Jews in the eyes of others; plus the romantic essentialism of nationalism in the later 1800s, which defined nationality rigidly and could not fit Jews in. Then when Jews turned to nationalism in response to this exclusion, that itself fed into the anti-semitic nationalism of others.

Professor Bartal also took a lecture to trace how messianism had been spreading within the Jewish world in a particular way even right before modernity. In its kabbalistic form, Jewish messianic suggested a cosmic process unfolding toward redemption, helped along by the spiritual acts of individual Jews. The movements that embraced this kind of messianism created a spiritual energy separate from the authority of traditional halacha and the rabbis whose authority came with that. I think what he was saying was that by the 1800s, with the wide spread of Hasidut, the Jewish world was ripe in this religious way for another change movement which was not built on traditional authority and which saw redemption as a possibility in the foreseeable future. But I haven't read ahead yet....

Meanwhile, in art, we are at the other end of the Middle Ages. What's interesting is how Charlemagne adopted forms and traditions and ideas from the Roman Empire, which is so unrelated to where he came from. He continued a pattern of new rulers incorporating pieces of prior monuments into his own, of making sure to be represented as both militarily strong and fundamentally just in his rule, as an embodiment of piety and the heavenly. Like other turning-point figures in later Roman history, Charlemagne turned back to Augustus as a model of representation to imitate. It's fascinating that rather than simply obliterate the Roman legacy he took it on, and that the papacy saw it as in its interest to ally with and crown Charlemagne as a continuation. One particular thing that strikes me in the notes, again not realizing I had seen it then, is the Christian shift from pagan temples, where priests are within but most people are outside, to the church as basilica, a public architecture where the people are within even as they may be wowed by grandeur.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #11: Exodus and Ethics

Most of this series is about specific concepts in Jewish ethics, but like the last one I recorded I want to talk here about something foundational, namely the Exodus story and how it generates so much of Jewish ethics.

Sometimes when we say “Exodus” we’re talking about the part we focus on during Pesach, the festival of Passover, from enslavement by Pharoah to liberation by the Divine. This Exodus is known in Jewish terminology as the Going-Out from Egypt, Yetziat Mitzrayim.

There is a book of the Torah called Exodus, or Shmot in Hebrew. The book of Exodus takes the story further, toward Mt. Sinai where the people experience Divine revelation, enter into a covenant, and receive many specific laws and teachings. It includes the story of the Golden Calf, the first major challenge to those teachings. Shmot ends with the people contributing from their own materials toward the building of the Mishkan, a sacred tent where a cloud of Divine presence comes to rest.

And sometimes when we talk about the Exodus, we mean actually everything that happens in the Torah after Yetziat Mitzrayim, including the whole forty-year journey through the desert and all the challenges and insights of that journey, all the way to the doorstep of the Promised Land.

Here are some ways that Yetziat Mitzrayim shapes Jewish ethics.

First, the Exodus extends the idea that human beings are created in the image of the Divine, B’tzelem Elohim. God pays attention to a people who as outcast as a people can be. A people exiled from their home, feeling abandoned by their God -- indeed, living in a deep valley far from the heavens. A people demonized by a ruler, feared by him and then mocked by him. A people covered in the mud in which they worked as they made bricks for Pharaoh’s works. This is the people the Divine chose as the vehicle for bringing Torah into the world. This is the way the Divine chose to reveal something of God’s essential nature, by showing the Israelites and the world that no one is beyond the reach of Divine attention.

Second, and related, the book of Exodus presents this as though it were a heavier lift for God than even creating the heavens and the earth. Requiring even more Divine energy, metaphorically speaking. It takes many more chapters to make liberation happen than it does to create the universe. In Genesis the Divine creates against a backdrop of formlessness, but in Exodus there is an active and powerful enemy in Pharaoh who calls himself a god. It’s in proving God’s-self against Pharaoh that God shows the measure of Divine strength and greatness.

Third, the opening chapters of Exodus show different people pulled toward connections to others and their responsibilities to them, motivated by more than group solidarity. The first people we meet in the book of Shmot include midwives who serve Israelite mothers but might themselves be Egyptian; Pharaoh’s own daughter, who decides to override her father’s decree of death for Hebrew babies when she is face-to-face with one herself; Moshe, who when he first encounters slaves we’re not sure if he knows he’s an Israelite or if they do either. These stories force us to ask how it is that people decide whom they are connected to, reconcile different sources of authority, reconcile law and compassion, reconcile public identity and conscience.

Fourth, the experience of Yetziat Mitzrayim shows up in all kinds of specific Jewish ethical teachings. The most obvious is the one labeled over and over by the Torah itself: Do not oppress or abuse or defraud someone who is “other” (ger) in your society, because that was you in the land of Egypt. The Torah’s business and labor ethics are meant to be the opposite of Pharaoh. The prohibition against verbal abuse and fraud is a response to Pharaoh. Even the importance of returning lost objects to their owners is an echo of the Divine restoring us, a lost people, to our place and our dignity.

Some of these sorts of things are of course in other systems of ethics too. But in Judaism, we are guided to see ourselves and others always in the light of the Exodus. Not only as a past experience, but as an essential drama taking place on a daily basis. We are always trying to be aware of when we slip into the habits of Pharaoh in our own domain, and whether there is someone near us who might need the same outstretched arm we did in Mitzrayim.

Lessons For Our Moment, From When the Ten Commandments Were Individually Delivered

This is a version of the D'var Torah on Parashat Yitro that I gave in 2021/5781. I've lightly updated it to reflect the changes in the pandemic and the presidential administration since then. It centers a midrash I've linked, and my own take on that midrash.

The midrash called Shir Ha-Shirim Rabba takes the opening of the Song of Songs and applies it to the revelation of the Ten Commandments. The verse says, and I don’t know if my blushing will come through on camera -- Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן. Like The Weavers: “kisses sweeter than wine.”

The midrash is one of my all-time favorites and as I tell it now hopefully by now some of you will be remembering from when I’ve told it before.

Rabbi Yochanan said that for each of the Ten Commandments, the Divine sent a personal messenger, a מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, to bring that particular mitzvah to each Israelite, to tell it to them, and then to have a discussion about it, for as long as necessary until the particular Israelite would say: I agree.

So imagine the mal’ach coming to you and saying: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or spouse or servant or donkey or anyting else that belongs to them. And you say: I’ve already agreed not to steal anything  -- does God really care if I’m feeling jealous from time to time?

And the mal’ach says well it depends, maybe your envy will cause you unconsciously to pressure your neighbor to give you something you don’t really need and that’s not really going to make you better off. After all, this is your neighbor who would do anything for you and wants you not to be distressed, or maybe just wants to get you out of their hair. So how about instead of thinking about what they have that you don’t, you try to figure out what’s eating you?

And the Israelite says: Ah, that’s why you (meaning: God) included their spouse and their house and the people who labor for them and their animals. You mean sometimes we get focused on the easy life we think someone else is having right now, we think why can’t mine be like that, and then maybe we think they don’t deserve it, I do -- and that drives us apart?

And the messenger says: You’ve got it. Of course we use others to judge our situation, but that’s a first step, not a shortcut.

Envy is a clue to think about what’s out of whack. Maybe it’s something in your power, or maybe it’s out there in society, in the distribution of houses and donkeys and fields. Use that itch to think about those things, and maybe your neighbor even agrees with you about that and you can bond. Okay, says the Israelite, this coveting thing -- you’re not trying to control my mind, it’s trying to make sure we don’t  get so caught up in our minds that we drive ourselves apart from our neighbors.

And the mal’ach says: So it’s a law, agreed, no coveting? And the Israelite says: Yes! And then the midrash says the mal’ach gives them a kiss -- “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” -- and the Israelite feels great, and really connected. And the mal’ach goes back to the mothership for the next mitzvah.

Rabbi Yochanan imagines each Israelite during the revelation of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments)  in their own spiritual bubble, with a personal angelic tutor who is very patient and a personal time warp. Rabbi Yochanan is solving a problem of grammar in the Ten Commandments, which is actually a bigger problem. The commands are delivered in the Hebrew singular even though all the Israelites are together. And even though every thing in the Ten Commandments only makes sense in the context of the collective. Honoring parents, and not murdering; letting your household rest on Shabbat, and not coveting -- those are all social. Even the issue of idols is about taking some power  or image recognized by everyone and projecting that as a godly power.

It’s all social, but Rabbi Yochanan says there’s a paradox -- first each person has to go into a kind of isolation, and then “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” The individual is wooed into the collective in a very deliberate way. Crossing the sea in a big crowd and singing together wasn’t enough. Each person has to feel loved with some love that is as big as everything, that is love from the Divine and the whole people, and also gets connected through a specific other. Only an individual who has been spoken to and kissed this way by a divine representative will say: What we have together is better than wine, better than the high that I experience from my own pleasure or the buzz I get from having my own ideas all on my own.

Up until now, the people had only negative experiences of the collective. Being miserable together, as slaves, who sometimes turned on each other. Watching Egyptian togetherness -- conformity, complicity in evil, mass psychology, the mob. Even when they got out, the Israelites knew themselves frequently as a group of complainers.

How could they trust themselves to be a group that could heal from slavery and get to the promised land? They needed shared ideas, and not shared idols. They needed a picture of fulfillment more motivating than coveting what some small group of them had.

Rabbi Yochanan in the midrash says that if each Israelite will feel loved enough to say “yes” for a moment, ten times, then we get to the  verse right after the Ten Commandments: “and all the people together perceived the voices and saw the bright lights” וְכָל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם v’chol ha’am ro’im et hakolot v’et halapidim.

A path to solidarity is what we need right now. We need it to stay alive, we need it to be more than just alive. It’s tempting to think of groups, especially political groups, only in terms of mobs and groupthink. It’s easy to perceive comformity, or to see insider groups that do sloppy work together. Those are real dangers of groups.

So Rabbi Yochanan says solidarity has to be built a person at a time, out of two elements: it’s built out of discussion, and out of loving affirmation. It has to originate on top of the mountain; there has to be somewhere for everyone to look up. But the real work is up close, person by person.

We can’t just assert solidarity or unity. It doesn’t come via the media or speeches. We have to make it by wooing people with our ideas and with our love. On the political level, when I first wrote this D’var Torah, I wanted President Biden and Vice President Harris when they were in office to go out and identify individual communities, let’s say the counties in this country where they got the lowest percentage of the vote, and have a midrash kind of conversation -- here are some principles and ideas, let’s talk about them, talk back and I’ll answer. And even if we don’t find a yes ,we’ll go back to the mothership in DC and come back shortly for the next conversation.

Same for Republican leaders in Congress --  do that. Find whatever community organizng group or congregation will do that with you in those counties. Set up a health clinic for the community there, and have the conversations.

On an individual level, in our own synagogue and our local community, we have to be the personal ambassadors for solidary rooted in reasoned conversation and love, for anyone who opens their ears or their arms.

We are going to need more of this kind of solidarity, to comfront the challenges of Am Yisrael and the United States, and to build our own community as a place that is welcoming and helps each of us reflect and be challenged, grow and flourish. It can’t be done if all we do is criticize when groups fail, which they often do. We need to build the collectives where we trust, and ask what it would take to give ourselves over in solidarity, to say yes to what the divine messengers are offering us.

It’s so hard to imagine getting to that kind of solidarity these days, to believing it’s possible. And it’s hard to imagine that we require it -- but I think there is no alternative. Some critical mass of solidarity is a matter of life and death. It doesn’t have to be everyone but it has to be more than it’s been in a long time. At Mt Sinai time could stand still to get that kind of solidarity, and even then it only held for a short time even for B’nai Yisrael.  We can’t stop time like that. But we each need to be receptive to messengers who come and offer us rational conversation and love, and we need to find opportunities to be those messengers.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” That kind of intimacy, that kind of solidarity -- it can be scary; we know it was in the Torah. Resisting solidarity will always have its rewards for people -- the wine, the yayin, is a symbol for a real intense feeling that you don’t share but have just on your own. It’s not lasting, but it’s powerful. I myself (Jon) do covet -- and what I covet are pockets of solidarity in this world that are somewhere else. But then I know the question is how not be jealous, but to learn how to do solidarity better right here. So let’s think about how we can open ourselves when the mal’achim come and try to connect us more deeply, and how to be those divine messengers ourselves, patiently trying to build the solidarity we need for life and healing, to overcome isolation, for justice and for peace.     

Shabbat Shalom.